social media – Hellbound and Down

Florida wins key ruling allowing it to enforce a law that targets social media use by kids

The state of Florida won a key court decision Wednesday that allows it to enforce a ban on social media accounts for kids under 14 and other restrictions.

The law was one of the most restrictive in the U.S. on social media use by children when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it in 2024.

The law implicates the First Amendment, an appeals court said, but “likely does so in a content-neutral manner.”

It would likely survive a full legal challenge “because it doesn’t burden substantially more speech than necessary to advance the important interest in protecting minors from social media addiction,” a panel from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 3-0 opinion.

The law bans social media accounts for Florida children under 14 and requires parental consent for use by kids who are 14 or 15.

Industry trade groups the Computer & Communications Industry Association and NetChoice sued Florida, arguing that the law violated the free-speech rights of social media providers and users. A judge in 2025 said the law likely was unconstitutional and granted an injunction.

That injunction was put on hold while the appeals court heard the case. The lawsuit, with the injunction now overturned, will return to federal court in Tallahassee.

The appeals court noted that the law covers social media platforms “that have been determined to induce heavy use by children, and applies only to platforms that use both algorithms and one of several addictive features.”

An email seeking comment from the Florida attorney general’s office was not immediately answered. NetChoice said it was disappointed with the decision.

“We are currently evaluating all of our options as we continue the fight to ensure Floridians’ rights to free expression online are protected, and parents remain in the driver’s seat when it comes to making decisions for their families,” said Paul Taske, a lawyer at NetChoice.

Keep reading

Every Bad Idea Australia Ever Had About the Internet, Now in One Bill

A “safety net upstream” – that’s how Australia’s Communications Minister Anika Wells described the intent behind the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026, introduced to the country’s Parliament on Thursday.

Wells was making the announcement hours before she was to address the National Press Club. The bill, which is 90 pages long, carries a civil penalty of up to 60,000 penalty units, or $109.2 million, for failing the duty.

In Parliament, Wells said, “It moves the safety net upstream to the people who design the product to stop the harm before it ever reaches an Australian.”

At the Press Club, she put it this way: setting “basic safety standards for the online services we use every day” will see the platforms regulated “just like we have in every other industry.”

Wells said that the goal is to “shift the burden from the shoulders of victims to the companies that are creating the environments where harms occur.”

She added: “To make this abundantly clear, we have removed the ministerial rule-making power to define new harms in the final bill.”

Instead, she said, “New harms can be added by parliament through legislative amendment.”

The takedown changes in Schedule 1 kick in the day after Royal Assent, while the duty of care itself comes into force 12 months later.

In September, the exposure draft gave the minister the power to add, by instrument, any material “that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm.” That power is now gone.

The bill does not at any point ask platforms to balance their “duty of care” with the need to protect freedom of expression and privacy of users.

Section 26 sets the duty: a platform “must take appropriate action to ensure a safe online environment, including by taking effective measures to mitigate risks.”

Section 26A spells out what counts as “appropriate” and “effective.” The matters to be taken into account “include” how far the measures achieve “a safe online environment,” how much they reduce the risk of harmful material, “the impact on the security of the online service,” and “whether the action or measures are or would be proportionate to the level of risk.”

Section 26A(3) states: “The cost of the action or measures must not be taken into account.”

Nowhere in this is freedom of expression or privacy mentioned. The word “encryption” does not appear at all in the 90 pages, nor do the phrases “freedom of expression” or “free speech.”

In the UK Online Safety Act – which is no friend of free speech, either – there is at least a section (22) that imposes on platforms, when deciding on safety measures, “a duty to have particular regard to the importance of protecting users’ right to freedom of expression within the law,” and a matching duty on privacy.

The Australian bill has no such provision.

Keep reading

UK’s Online Safety Act has silenced, punished free speech in ways that pose as warning to Americans

It’s a focal point of national discussion: online hate, misinformation and what constitutes each. While many Americans still consider the First Amendment a near-absolute for free speech, Britain has taken a starkly different approach.

The country’s Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, was billed as protection for kids. But it’s unleashed what many consider disturbing policing of online speech. And it comes with a warning for people in the U.S.

In Southport, England, in 2024, the British-born son of Rwandan immigrants stabbed to death three little girls and injured 12 others, slashing one six-year-old 122 times and trying to cut off her head. The horrific murders sparked riots and a free speech crackdown.

Jamie Michael, a former Royal Marine and father of two young daughters, took to Facebook with a call to action.

“I posted a 12-minute video asking, calling on the community to come together and have a meeting so that we can discuss safety measures for the schools and parks,” Michael told Full Measure in an interview in London.

Police soon showed up at his workplace in Wales – and arrested him.

“The words they said: that could be “indecent racial hatred,” Michael said. “They actually said that I’d had terrorist intentions, that’s what was on the police report.”

While he was in jail, Michael says, officials altered a transcript of his Facebook video – to make it look like he’d admitted to starting a riot. Yet he’d said no such thing.

“So I put my hand up in the court to say, you know, ‘Things are wrong.’ [I] wanted to say, ‘That’s wrong, and this is wrong,’ and the judge literally shouted me down, said, ‘Sit down.’ He said, ‘This isn’t a place for you to speak.’ And I was like, ‘Wow.’”

Businesswoman Bernie Spofforth was also arrested for her social media post after the Southport murders.

“I was taken to the police station and held for 36 hours like a terrorist. Held for 36 hours,” she says.

Her offense? She had shared the identity circulating online of a supposed suspect: asylum seeker Ali Al-Shakati.

Spofforth didn’t know it, but someone had made up the name. She deleted the post when she couldn’t confirm the name. But days later, police came for her, too.

“What were they trying to prove?” Full Measure asked her.

“Malicious communications and making up communications in a racist way,” Spofforth responded. “ They thought I’d made the name up in order to create hate and to incite violence, which, of course, I didn’t do.”

It’s a 2023 British law that’s largely responsible: the Online Safety Act. The government framed it as vital to protecting children. But Claire Fox says shocking provisions in the fine print outlaw speech that “harms.”

Fox is a member of the British House of Lords in Parliament and founder of the Academy of Ideas, which advocates for free speech.

She was one of the only legislators who opposed the British bill because of broad generalizations as to what it criminalized.

“In this particular bill, the Online Safety Act, they then stressed, ‘Well, no, when we say ‘harm,’ we don’t mean physical harm, we mean psychological harm.’ Psychological harm is an elastic term that’s become inflated beyond any recognition, which basically says, you know, anything can be harmful,” Fox told Full Measure.

“You hurt my feelings?” Full Measure asked.

“You hurt my feelings,” Fox confirmed. “And that’s what happened through the online safety bill. And that became institutionalized in law.”

Police in England and Wales arrested more than 12,000 people in 2023 alone for violating communications law: not only for obvious incitement to violence but also for private messages and chats deemed to persistently cause “annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety.”

Keep reading

Florida Seeks Meta ID Checks For All Users

Florida’s attorney general is asking a court to make sure Meta (Facebook and Instagram) puts in place a system to check the age of all its users in that state.

If the court grants the motion, every user in Florida will have to surrender their privacy and will have to verify their age to access speech and, if they are under 14, Meta will have to remove them from the platforms. And if Meta can’t do that within 30 days, it will have to cut off every user under 18 until it implements the age-checking system.

In the meantime, the court is asked to order Meta to set limits on the use of its platforms by teenagers, including hours when they can use them, and features they can access.

“Request proof of age for Instagram and Facebook accounts belonging to users that Meta’s systems know or predict to be under the age of 14, and mark for deletion the accounts of those who do not verify their age within 30 days,” the filing says.

It also wants Meta to “Adopt and apply an age assurance framework to every Teen User.”

It asks Meta to “Treat users who Meta has reason to believe are under 14 or under 18 years of age as under those respective ages unless the users age verify.”

The motion spells it out: “If within 30 days of the entry of this injunction, Meta cannot implement the measures for user-age verification and removal in this and the prior sections, Meta must cease to allow any Young Users access to its Platforms in Florida until these measures are implemented.” Young Users means users under 18.

The default mode for teens should be “quiet mode from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. year-round, and from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on academic-year weekdays”, the filing says. It also wants Meta to hide “like” counts from teenagers by default, disable autoplay and infinite scroll unless a parent turns them on, and limit the time spent on the platforms to “not more than 60 hours per month.”

The motion mentions internal Meta communications, including one that says “IG is a drug” and another that reads, “We’re basically pushers.”

Another employee is quoted as saying about hiding “like” counts, “It’s a social comparison app, fucking get used to it.”

The court is yet to rule on the motion, but Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the filing on X, saying, “We just asked a Florida court to order Meta to turn off the features that addict teenagers and to leave Florida kids alone when they’re in school or sleeping.”

Uthmeier also revealed that Meta tried to get Florida to accept a settlement, but was rebuffed. “Meta tried to get us to take their low-ball settlement, but we wont sell out our kids,” he wrote.

The attorney general’s motion calls the national settlement a “mere slap on the wrist” for a company that is valued at “roughly $1.86 trillion.”

Keep reading

New Mexico Found a Way to Fine Platforms for Speech It Didn’t Delete

A civil jury has found Meta liable for violating New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, and now the judge is being asked to order the company to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion.

At a hearing on October 1 in Santa Fe, special prosecutor Randi McGinn asked Judge Francis Mathew of the First Judicial District Court to order Meta to pay this amount, while a lawyer for the social media giant said such a penalty would be “an astronomical” one, violating “a host of constitutional provisions.”

Meta is being punished for making false statements about user privacy, and also for not removing “hate speech” and “misinformation” fast enough.

The verdict was delivered on September 25, finding Meta had made 26 false or misleading statements, resulting in nearly 43.9 million violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act.

This would translate to a maximum of $5,000 per violation, or $219 billion in all – more than the $206 billion the tobacco industry had to pay in a settlement in 1998. The state asked for about 20% of this amount.

The number of violations was arrived at by counting the number of people in New Mexico, and the number of Facebook users in the state, and then multiplying these numbers by the number of times Meta made false statements in news outlets and on its own platforms.

The state had to show only that harm was likely, not that it actually occurred.

Meta is being punished for lying about how it handled user data, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw a third party harvest data from about 87 million profiles. The company is also being punished for not removing “hate speech” and “misinformation” fast enough – and the number of violations in this category is about a quarter of the total.

The New Mexico case is not the only one where Meta is being forced to pay up – in March, a Santa Fe jury ordered it to pay $375 million in a case involving child safety on Facebook and Instagram, and in August, the judge in that case added another $567 million for a youth mental health fund.

In August, 47 states reached a settlement with Meta, along with other social media companies, that will see them pay $17 billion. Judge Mathew mentioned this during the October 1 hearing, saying that due process suggests he should opt for a much lower amount than what the state of New Mexico is asking for.

During the hearing, Meta’s lawyer Matt Nicholson described the case as “about 26 statements over 11 years” and said that the state “made absolutely no showing that anyone in the state of New Mexico ever saw them, relied on them or were harmed by them in any way.”

McGinn countered that “the one thing you didn’t hear from counsel is an apology.”

Keep reading

	Bigus Macus on Education Department Calls For…
	freemattpodcast on Trump Admin Weighs Emergency P…
	freemattpodcast on Muslim-Majority Turkey Detains…
	Bigus Macus on DOJ Seizes Over $560,000 in Cr…
	Study: Homeschool Ki… on Study: Homeschool Kids Outperf…